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\n Stephen McDermott<\/p>\n
IT\u2019S THE MOST wonderful time of the year.<\/p>\n
You officially have permission to start counting the weeks until Christmas: the annual row over Dublin City Council\u2019s Winter Lights Festival has begun.<\/p>\n
The festival, which usually takes place in December, is a series of installations that wash buildings across the capital with lighting displays of winter-themed images and colour.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a perfectly inoffensive thing that gives the city a bit of colour at night during some of the darkest months of the year.<\/p>\n
Not that you\u2019d know it from Facebook, X and Instagram, where users assembled for their annual Two Minutes Hate.<\/p>\n
They said things like \u201cthey should be called Christmas Lights\u201d, and accused the council of sidelining Christianity by egregiously appeasing immigrants and non-white people.<\/p>\n
These largely anonymous accounts reminded nobody in particular that Ireland is a Catholic country; they asked questions like \u201cWho is electing the communist scum in DCC?\u201d; and they warned that \u201cRamadan lights\u201d would follow in February.<\/p>\n
I can\u2019t tell how much of this is sincerely believed and how much is manufactured for an online audience, but the claim that Christmas is being erased barely survives a walk through Dublin.<\/p>\n
The council still garlands shopping streets with lights that say Nollaig Shona Duit; it still blocks footpaths with 50-foot Christmas trees; and it has even faced down calls by pesky animal rights activists to end the live crib at the Mansion House on Dawson Street.<\/p>\n
I have literally never heard a single person in the wild complain about Winter Lights or claim that it\u2019s taken over Christmas.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s an argument that makes my phone feel like a telescope into an alternate version of Dublin, where everyone is furious about something nobody mentions as soon as I put it away.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, Dublin City Council seems to have taken the annual online backlash on board.<\/p>\n
This year, the council has moved Winter Lights from December to January in an apparent bid to avoid any confusion that the festival has usurped Christmas in the hearts and minds of Dubliners.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, it unveiled a second programme of events that will take place in December, in a press release that carefully emphasised how Christmas has not, in fact, been cancelled.<\/p>\n
\u201cDubliners love Christmas, Dublin City Centre is synonymous with Christmas time and Dublin City Council is committed to bring Christmas themed activity throughout the whole festive season,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, no media relations office in the world can satisfy the haters once they\u2019ve started fulminating; never doubt the power of\u00a0rage to keep people from seeing the facts when they\u2019ve launched into their annual jeremiad.<\/p>\n
Far-right Dublin City councillor Gavin Pepper joined the chorus after the first announcement,\u00a0taking to X<\/a>\u00a0to say\u00a0that Winter Lights should happen in December because \u201cthey are Christmas lights \u2013 they belong at Christmas\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t accept the argument that this display has somehow got nothing to do with Christmas,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n When the second December programme was outlined on Thursday, he\u00a0called it<\/a>\u00a0a \u201creasonable response\u201d \u2013 though it was not really a response.<\/p>\n Yet there was no capitulation: Winter Lights is still going ahead, there have always been Christmas lights in Dublin, and the council said in its first announcement on Tuesday that it would be announcing a December programme of events.<\/p>\n What\u2019s striking about this victory lap is how the underlying facts didn\u2019t change for people to claim a win: they announced a threat that didn\u2019t exist, objected to it, then claimed credit when something that was already in the works happened anyway.<\/p>\n The irony about those who complain that the council has fallen under the malign influence of multiculturalism is that they\u2019re the ones importing their grievances from abroad.<\/p>\n Birmingham\u2019s Winterval festival was the target of the exact same criticisms<\/a> as Winter Lights in 1997, with claims that organisers had cancelled Christmas because the 42-day festival attempted to celebrate multiple religious occasions in a diverse city.<\/p>\n Almost 20 years later, Donald Trump led calls for a boycott of Starbucks<\/a>\u00a0after the coffee giant left snowflakes, reindeer and other seasonal motifs off its red Christmas cups.<\/p>\n Easter has also become a target in the UK, where there have been complaints about the removal of the festival\u2019s name\u00a0from the description of egg hunts<\/a> and on the packaging of chocolate eggs<\/a>; it feels inevitable this will soon be imported across the Irish Sea.<\/p>\n What is conspicuously absent from each of these controversies is a shred of evidence that city councils or big brands are making changes to accommodate multiculturalism \u2013 or that minority groups are calling for changes they\u2019re being blamed for.<\/p>\n Nobody demanded that Dublin\u2019s Christmas lights should be called Winter Lights, or that the festival should move to January, because they were offended.<\/p>\n Dublin City Council\u2019s explanations for the existence of the festival and its move to January are pretty reasonable: it wants to bring people into the capital, in what is usually the quietest stretch of the year for businesses, between Christmas and Patrick\u2019s Day.<\/p>\n When you see the reaction online, it\u2019s understandable why the council wanted to take steps to address it this year, as much as it feels like officials are always going to be fighting a losing battle.<\/p>\n Like the rest of us, they may be counting down the days until this is over for another year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Stephen McDermott IT\u2019S THE MOST wonderful time of the year. You officially have permission to start counting the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":637448,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[9484,10542,174724,615,13288,77631,61,174725,60,43,58,83339],"class_list":["post-637447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-christmas","tag-algorithms","tag-diary-of-a-man-on-the-internet","tag-dublin","tag-dublin-city-council","tag-gavin-pepper","tag-ie","tag-internet-diaries","tag-ireland","tag-news","tag-social-media","tag-winter-lights"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=637447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637447\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/637448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=637447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=637447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=637447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}